Matt West is a Disney adult, but not in the pejorative way that term gets thrown around. Disney has been part of his life and career since he was a teenager. “This is my 55th year working with the company, off and on,” he said.
He’s not only worked for the House of Mouse. His career as a choreographer has included working with Elton John and Bernie Taupin on their vampiric musical Lestat, and Eartha Kitt off-Broadway on Mimi le Duck. In addition, dance fans may recognize him as Bobby, aka #84, in both the Broadway and big screen versions of A Chorus Line. Yet Disney has always been part of his life as a dancer and choreographer, starting when he was 12 and then kicking into a new gear when he moved to New York, aged 17. “My first job was at Radio City,” he recalled, “and I was actually working for Disney in a group called Kids of the Kingdom, and we were the special guest stars.”
Since then, his work on shows at Disney parks like The Nutcracker, World of Color, Dreaming Up!, Jubilation!, and Fantasmic! has continued that connection to Mickey and friends throughout his career.
But the show that made him synonymous with Disney was one of the most important live productions in the company’s history. West was choreographer for the original 1994 stage production of Beauty and the Beast, an adaptation of the 1991 Best Picture Oscar-nominated animated fairytale that has enchanted audiences for over three decades. At the time, bringing cartoons to the stage was seen as a risky gamble, but it was a smash hit, and earned West multiple nominations and a Drama-Logue win at award season. Now he’s revisited that legacy as director and choreographer of the first touring production of the show since 2016, arriving at Austin’s Bass Concert Hall Dec. 2-14.
For fans of the original production, it’s still the same tale as old as time, but this show will be a fresh experience, with new musical arrangements by David Chase, new orchestration by Danny Troob, new staging from Stanley A. Meyer, and completely new choreography from West. “All of these ideas I had in my back pocket for 30 years. Finally I got to do them,” he grinned.
West explained that revisiting the show was a bucket list item for him. He’d actually seen the original animated film on opening day at the El Capitan Theatre on Hollywood Boulevard. It was a theatre he knew well: Earlier that year, before screenings of Disney’s The Rocketeer, he’d been part of “a Rockettes-style tap number before each show. The audiences went crazy because they’d never seen anything like that.” (Now he gets to complete the circle, adding a tap element to “Be Our Guest” for the revived Beauty.)
Looking back on seeing Beauty and the Beast on opening day, he said, “I felt the way everybody felt, which was pretty amazed. I come from the theatre, and I was pretty amazed at the theatricality of such an animated film.”
What he didn’t know at that screening was that he would become the choreographer to take that on-screen theatricality to the stage and bring the movie magic with it. He recalled, “Part of the requirement from Michael Eisner, who was the Disney CEO at the time, was to put the animated film on the stage. And as we dove into that in our R&D of it, [we learned] it’s hard to do that live. Animation is animation. But we found some moments and places where we could re-create or be true to the animation.”
Coming back to Beauty 30 years later wasn’t just about mounting a revival. This is in many ways a new show. “I’m not precious about my work,” West said. “I think that everything can always be improved [and] the show has so much more movement now than it ever has.”
Moreover, his relationship with the material has changed. He’s less interested in certain kinds of physical comedy (“I don’t think kicking or punching or slapstick is appropriate anymore”), but he’s more committed than ever to “these characters who are beloved around the entire world, not just America. I have companies in Japan, Australia. I’m now casting Vienna. … This show is known, and these characters are known, so I wanted to be true to the characters that people know.”
The durability of the show stems in no small part from the fact that Belle is, as West describes her, a truly contemporary character. “She’s the first Disney princess who was not waiting for her prince. She’s not waiting to be saved. She wants her own life. She wants anything but the guy riding up on a horse, and that’s contemporary for a Disney fairytale.”
The show has also grown up with the generations of audiences that fell in love with Belle and the Beast, so it’s not just for younger generations but also “a date night experience. We have audiences who are almost 100% adult who come to see it, and it appeals to them, and they go crazy for ‘Be Our Guest’ and towards the end you see arms go around shoulders, you see heads go on shoulders.”
In redesigning the show, West was dedicated to keeping the original color palette, “but [relooked] at some of the shapes, some of the silhouettes, some of the tricks that these characters do simply because so much has grown up in terms of technology, in terms of the fabrics and what they can do, and tailoring.”
Such changes speak to the close relationship between choreography and wardrobe, and in this case between West and another returning member of the 1994 creative team: costume designer Ann Hould-Ward, who took home a Tony in 1994 for her designs. Early on in the original design process the tendency was to stick too close to Eisner’s edict to be like the cartoon, and as a result the costumes were “becoming stiff pieces of foam, plexiglass, and plastics, and I was like, ‘I can’t move in this stuff,’ so we threw all of that out and started over, and that was really the turning point in finding the way to tell this story onstage with humans and not animation.”
West admitted that he’s become more involved in the costuming choices and enjoys the collaborative process. “Over the years, I’ve gotten better at it, and I mean by that I’ve become more opinionated about it all, and now I am very involved in the fabric choices, and sampling things, and putting it on people and seeing how it moves and how it looks when it’s wired to be lit.”
One of the biggest changes since the original production is that the human aspects of the characters are more obvious. In the animated film, characters like Cogsworth, Lumiere, and Mrs. Potts are a clock, a candelabra, and a tea pot, but with human aspects. In the new show, there is more emphasis on how they are people who become household objects, and that’s explored in a new version of “Human Again.” First written by composer Alan Menken and lyricist Howard Ashman for – and then cut from – the feature film, a revised version was included in the original Broadway production. In the film, the servants of the castle are anthropomorphized household items, but onstage they are “slowly transforming throughout our journey with them.”
That evolution is expressed in a new take on Menken’s song, new choreography from West, new costumes from Hould-Ward, and tweaks to the text from another returning talent: Linda Woolverton, who not only penned the original film script but adapted it herself for the 1994 stage version’s book. Together, West said, “We hit on the idea that they are not fully realized objects. They are people turning into objects.”
In the film, the servants hope Belle will break the spell so that they can resume their previous lives as people. In the musical, when the last petal falls from the enchanted rose, their transformation into inanimate objects will become complete and irreversible. West explained, “Lumiere says something about, ‘We’re not far behind. Slowly, as every day passes, we become things.’ So we started putting that into the dialogue throughout the show. Mrs. Potts says, ‘Look at me, I can hardly bend over at all any more.’
“We kept reminding the audience of that – that they were slowly transforming into objects. And once we hit on that, then the costume design flowed because it was really about seeing the human element. We were trying to cover up the human element – how do we not see the human body? – but then we hit on this: Wait a minute. They don’t have to be [animated]. They don’t have to be fully realized as objects. They can be humans turning into things.”
At one point in development, the characters would add more elements to the costumes, to show their transmogrification, “but along the way we found we didn’t even need to do that. All we had to do was remind the audience of the spell.”
For West, changes like how “Human Again” has grown speak to the spirit and moral of Beauty and the Beast, throughout all its versions. “That’s what it’s really about,” he said. “To see the person beyond the exterior. To see the real you.”
Disney’s Beauty and the Beast runs Dec. 2-14 at Bass Concert Hall. Tickets and info at beautyandthebeastthemusical.com.
